Motherboards

While Sapphire Technology is a brand more commonly associated with graphics cards than motherboards, after having great experiences with the Sapphire Pure Black P67 Hydra motherboard, we accepted their offer to look at the Sapphire Pure Platinum A75 motherboard. The Sapphire Pure Platinum A75 is a motherboard for AMD Fusion "Llano" APUs and packs quite a number of features. Here's how the Sapphire Pure Platinum A75 works under Linux.

We recently reviewed the ASRock H61M/U3S3 motherboard at Phoronix, which was a very nice Intel Sandy Bridge motherboard with integrated graphics for those on a limited budget. While the H61 is great on the low-end side, Intel recently introduced the Z68 chipset. The Z68 is designed to take the features of the P67 chipset and its tuning capabilities while enabling the integrated HD Graphics 3000 support. In this review, we are trying out the ASRock Z68 Pro3 motherboard.

At Phoronix we have reviewed several different motherboards under Linux since the Sandy Bridge launch with either the P67 or H67 chipsets, but in this review we are looking at one that uses the Intel H61 chipset. The particular motherboard under test is the ASRock H61M/U3S3, which was launched a few months back, but we've been waiting for the Intel Sandy Bridge open-source support under Linux to mature a bit more.

When talking about Sapphire Technology on Phoronix it is usually about their vast selection of Radeon graphics cards for which they are very well known and are one of AMD's premiere AIB partners. Recently, they have also expanded to offer a limited selection of high-end AMD and Intel motherboards. Being from Sapphire, these motherboards are not some budget motherboards with nothing to separate them from its competitors, but are rather well designed and very innovative boards. As the first Sapphire motherboard being reviewed under Linux at Phoronix, we are looking at their interesting Sandy Bridge offering: the Sapphire Pure Black P67 Hydra.

Now that the initial Intel Cougar Point chipset problems have been resolved, there is a plethora of motherboards on the market that support the latest Sandy Bridge processors. For enthusiasts, the current high-end SNB-supportive chipset is the Intel P67, of which there are also many different motherboards from various vendors. One of the P67 motherboards that attempts to provide some of the high-end features while at a mainstream price-point is the ECS P67H2-A2. This Elitegroup motherboard retails for less than $200 USD while it ships with two PCI Express x16 slots, USB 3.0, Serial ATA 3.0, and ECS overclocking features.

When it comes to Intel's Sandy Bridge, lately we have been looking a lot at the Linux graphics performance with the H67 chipset as it has been an interesting journey but now at least the OpenGL performance is good and VA-API video acceleration is working. Now that the B3-stepping Cougar Point motherboards are beginning to ship that address the original SATA issues for this chipset that led to a recall, we are back to looking at this magical CPU, the supported motherboards, and its overall Linux performance. In this review we are taking a Linux look at the ASRock P67 Pro3.

Last week we examined the ATI Radeon HD 4250 integrated graphics performance found with the AMD 880G chipset introduced a few months back. We found the performance of the 880G IGP to be not that different from the higher-end AMD 890GX chipset when using the proprietary Catalyst driver, but today we are looking more at the 880G chipset along with the 890FX chipset as we review the ASRock 880G Extreme3 and ASRock 890FX Deluxe3, respectively. Both low-cost motherboards offer USB 3.0, SATA 3.0, and eSATA3 connectivity, and Turbo UCC overclocking, among other features.

Earlier this year we reviewed an Intel H55 motherboard and found it to perform well under Linux both in terms of compatibility with the latest Linux distributions at the time as well as the overall system performance with our slew of open-source benchmarks. Intel's H57 Chipset was launched at the same time, but with the very few differences between the H55 and H57 chipsets, its Linux support and performance is about the same. Today though we are reviewing the ECS H57H-MUS motherboard to see how this Intel H57 motherboard performs on Linux, which also offers a few extra features like USB 3.0 and Serial ATA 3.0 support.

Earlier this year AMD rolled out the 890GX Chipset with an ATI Radeon HD 4290 integrated graphics processor, support for Serial ATA 3.0 with the SB850 Southbridge, DDR2/DDR3 memory support, and other leading features. About a month ago we reviewed the AMD Athlon II X3 425 processor when coupled with an AMD 890GX + SB850 motherboard and in this review we are taking a closer look at that motherboard under Linux. The motherboard in question is the MSI 890GXM-G65 with USB 3.0 and Serial ATA 6Gb/s support.

While Jetway is not one of the most popular brands of motherboards among enthusiasts, they do offer a nice variety of mini ITX motherboards, such as the NC92 IPC and NC96-510-LF motherboards that we have reviewed at Phoronix. Both of these petite motherboards have been built around the Intel Atom processor, but for those looking to find a mini ITX motherboard that can harness a bit more power, there is the Jetway NC84. The Jetway NC84 is what we are testing out today under Linux, which is a mini ITX motherboard that can handle up an AMD Phenom processor, sports an ATI Radeon HD 4200 IGP, and four Serial ATA 2.0 ports capable of RAID 0/1/5/10.